March 24, 2006

Sex, Lies and CMS Vendors

"You can recoup your software expenses by re-assigning the web team"
Sorry, but you'll still need the web team to run the CMS itself. To be sure, they should be able to work more efficiently, and if you previously outsourced HTML conversion you could save some hard costs here. There's a business case for Web content management, but it rarely falls on the cost side of the ledger.

"Our open-source solution means you'll get off cheap" &
"Our commercial solution is better supported than open-source alternatives"
Two sides of the same fib. Over time, licensing fees will constitute an increasingly smaller fraction of your total cost of ownership. The really big expenses lie in customization and integration, and here, some open-source tools will cost you more than their commercial equivalents.

At the same time, you'll find that support for a typical commercial CMS compares poorly against the kind of community help you can receive from from a large, global, open-source project. Key word there is "large."